


where the white lilies grow

by betony



Category: The Demon Lover - Traditional Ballad
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-21
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-12-27 06:34:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betony/pseuds/betony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's abandoned home and hearth for the sea, and no one quite understands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where the white lilies grow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raspberryhunter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberryhunter/gifts).



_Have you heard what’s become of Jane?_

* * *

Well, of course you should come to me to find out about Jane; we were only girls together, and dearer to each other than anyone else in our sleepy little town. Two peas in a pod, we were when we were younger; or one pea and one pokeweed, rather. (Jane was the pea, all soft and curved and short, and I the weed, stringy-haired and long-limbed as you see me now.) I remember her now: Jane so clever, at school and even after, writing all those letters off to London to those great minds—and me nothing more than simple-minded Bess. But you’ll only be wanting to know more about the gossip like everyone else, about the scandal and the rumors flying about. 

Fine, then! 

Jane _was_ promised—that is, she promised herself (there was never any hope of forcing Jane into something she didn’t want to do) to a sailor before she married Thomas, so what of it? If I could only count out every black-haired soldier and merchant and toff’s good-for-nothing son who spent a summer with one of our girls, and left them to stand up with their fathers’ apprentices not two months later, bellies already swelling underneath their wedding gowns, you’d see that Jane was a good girl, that she did nothing wrong. 

I was with her the day she met him. Jane had a thirst for the sea, you understand, and we’d leave our schoolbooks behind some days and go walk hand-in-hand by the harbor, all so Jane could sniff in the sea as though it were some sort of tonic. We saw William together, when he was stepping out of a tavern with bruised knuckles and a black eye and the jauntiness of a prize-winning cockerel. 

My eyes drank him in helplessly as he went by, and he so young and so fair you’d have thought he’d swallowed the sun; and his gaze caught on Jane’s face; and my Jane didn’t give him a second look until he stepped onto his gleaming ship, and then her eyes widened. 

Oh, I don’t mean to say she was looking only at his pockets, not our Jane; she wasn’t that sort. At least…I don’t believe she was. 

It was only that where I, foolish thing that I am, would notice the gleam of William’s golden hair or the smile that wrung your heart like a barman’s rag, Jane needed to watch first for the reverence with which he touched the railway of his ship, the cleverness with which he tied his knots. 

And she did. And they fell in love. 

I was there when they hid behind a couple of barrels on the dock, and William whispered into her hair that when his ship left, he would take her with him and give her all the fine things in all the world, and that she would sail with him, their hands steering towards paradise together…It sounded fair grand, I don’t mind telling you, and I hardly blame Jane for reaching up to kiss him them, even if all the harbor was out there with only me to keep my eyes out to warn them. 

I was there, too, that awful day, when the sky pissed down rain as Jane raced through the streets with me huffing and puffing behind, only to hear that William’s ship had sailed and he’d left no message behind. Oh, I wept and wailed enough to mourn ten thousand Williams, and Jane stood there, white-faced and dry-eyed, and you know the rest, how six months later, she stood up with Thomas, and ten months after that, she bore him a child. 

But if you’d only seen her face when she first heard that William was gone! 

I’m not surprise she went with him when he came back at last. I’m not. I’d like to see the woman who could have resisted him, as glorious as the dawn’s own child as he stood there the day we first saw him; and if he was nothing more than a monster, as your gossips claim, then he could lead me where he pleased. But it was Jane he chose, and Jane I’d have wanted that happily-ever-after for, and so I only stepped into her place, and married her Tom, and these days, her child calls me Ma. Sometimes when I look at my family I think she didn’t know what she was leaving behind; but I think of William, and how he was enough to tempt any woman, and I will not blame her, as long as I live. 

No matter what any of you might say. 

* * *

_Her sailor came back, with tales of all the wealth and riches he had won, all the princesses he had wooed and almost wed, and how he gave them all up for her; and she took his hand; and off she ran with him--_

* * *

I am the Princess your true love ought to have wed. 

Quick. Picture me now: am I tall, am I short? Fair or dark? Is my hair worn loose or plaited and strung with chiming beads? In which tongue do I whisper my sweet nothings into the shell of your true love’s ear? Where is the land whose crown I offered him? 

When we met, I was chained to a rock to be offered to a sea monster when his ship sailed into port, and with his shining sword he freed me. 

Too derivative? Well, then. 

When we met, my warriors and I stood along the beach to defend our shores, for thirty days and thirty nights we fought against the ship’s crew, until anger-born hatred turned to the respect of well-matched equals, and that respect turned in time to love. 

Too fantastic? How, then, do you find this: 

When we met, I watched through my eyelashes as my father the King negotiated with him, and when they finished, I clutched my father’s arm and whispered, “Father, I want him! Oh, I must have him!” 

Too childish? I see. 

When we met, when we made our formal bows, and your true love looked at me and he saw all he could have—the kisses, the wealth, the accolades—if not bound to you, and nevertheless he said no. Such a pity she same consideration never occurred to you. 

Does it matter? Do I? 

I am, after all, no more than a fantasy. 

It’s more liberating than you might imagine, being no more substantial than words on someone’s lips. I drift where I please; I transform myself as my fancy takes it; I see far, my darling. I see any choice you might make you’re bound to regret. 

Mostly I exist, my dear, to explain to you the value of fidelity. His was proven; yours was not. And let the knowledge of that gnaw at you, until you can neither eat nor sleep, dream nor think, and weep nor hope for anything further. 

For what choice do you have? Turn your love away and betray your girlhood oaths. Leave your husband behind and forsake your vows. Either way, a promise is broken. 

Guilt is the only real demon here. 

Oh, why couldn’t you have been nothing more than a story, like me? 

* * *

_She left behind her house to rot, her larders to spoil, and worst of all, she left her child wailing, aching for her._

* * *

These days they say my ma—my real ma, I mean—was Love’s victim and that means I should forgive her everything. Faugh! As much chance of that as of frogspawn falling from the sky. 

They never knew her, those who pretty up her story. You never knew a more pragmatic woman than my mother; I think her blood must have been as cool as those tidepools she’d take me to when she was still about. Always far too early in the mornings, when I was still rubbing sleep-sand from my eyes, just so she could collect her samples. 

I remember, still, one morning when she took me out. 

“Do you realize,” Mother said dreamily, “that there are entire gardens at the bottom of the sea? Anemones and sea fans and lilies, all drifting and dancing if we had eyes to see.” She stared down at the pool she was studying, and I realized with an odd lurch of my stomach that she wouldn’t mind at all if the sand below her feet gave way and let her through. 

“But you’ll drown,” I blurted out before I could think better of it, and Mother frowned. 

“What was that?” 

“Nothing,” I whispered, half-praying she would go back to paying me no heed, half-hoping she never would again. “It was nothing, Ma.” 

I might as well have told her _I_ was nothing for all the attention she gave me. 

She wouldn’t even read fairy tales to me at night, like a proper mother; just monographs about our seashore that she’d written and sent obsessively to the Royal Biologic Society (and for all the attention they paid, she might as well have sent them a rag to wipe their steers’ bums), and titles of works she wanted to write but couldn’t, being stranded here with nothing more to discuss than the—how would she put it?—neritic populations about the Northern English coastline. They all had names like _An Observation of the Marine Habitats of the Galapagos Islands_ and _A Study of the South American Tidewaters._

And she would smile in the way she never did for me or my da, and I would say, “Those sound lovely, Ma” and she would blink as though she’d forgotten I existed, and as she tucked me in, all I would be able to think about through the night was that I was the only reason she couldn’t have that life. 

They say my ma’s heart was full of irrational desire when she stepped out of the door and never came back. Horseshit, I say. Her heart was stuffed so full of cold, dark waters, that nothing—no human, at least—could ever compete with that sort of obsession. It called to her, day and night, until she had little choice but to give in; but I’ve no doubt she made the decision as ruthlessly as she did any other. 

I could have forgiven her for a human mistake, one driven by passion. If nothing else, even if she betrayed my da, even if she loved another man, even if she chose him over her own flesh and blood, I’d have been happy to see the hint of any feeling in her bleak soul. 

But this—this I’ll never forgive. 

* * *

_In the end she got what she deserved, the little tramp. No better than she ought to be, and how she’s paying for it at the bottom of the sea._

_But still I can’t help but—oh, yoo-hoo, you there, have you heard, oh, have you heard, what became of Jane?_

* * *

The sailors—as superstitious themselves as they arrogantly characterize the natives—call the islands _hell_ sometimes: the heat is brutal, the supplies limited, the beasties wild and dangerous. They’ve heard their share of stories about ships that ran out of supplies too early, who dashed themselves to pieces upon the rocks that surround the island like a collar—one way or another, those who approach the island are always claimed by the sea. And this time they have more reason than ever to be anxious; there’s a woman on board, as sunburned and windswept as the rest of them but still female and therefore cursed nonetheless. 

On the upper deck, Jane leans over the railing and smiles. The sea shines bright and all-too-inviting below her. She thinks: _I will never go back home again,_ and decides it’s just as well. She doesn’t deserve them; they don’t deserve her. 

“There’s a double meaning in that,” she quotes; her smile is mirthless. 

And something approaches, within her or without; whether her long-lost William, her guilt at her desertion, or the siren song of scientific pursuit. She lets it (him) wrap all over her. She lets him (it) press icy lips to her cheek. 

“This isn’t heaven,” she hears. 

“But it’s where we’re bound,” she replies, and laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> Jane's name comes from one of the original printings of the ballad, entitled : _"A Warning for Married Women, being an example of Mrs Jane Reynolds (a West-country woman), born near Plymouth, who, having plighted her troth to a Seaman, was afterwards married to a Carpenter, and at last carried away by a Spirit, the manner how shall be presently recited."_ (Yes, really.)  
>  The quote near the end is, of course, from Shakespeare's _Much Ado About Nothing_ , Act II, Scene 3.


End file.
